Although many questions have been raised about the efficacy of the Chinese-made Sinovac Covid vaccine, Chapala area residents rushed – and in some cases waited many hours – to get jabs this week.
While researchers in Turkey recently reported an efficacy rate of 83.5 percent for Sinovac based on final Phase 3 clinical trial data from 10,030 volunteers, experts in Hong Kong had previously assessed its efficacy at about 51 percent, while researchers in Brazil said it was only 50.4 effective at preventing symptomatic infections, barely above the threshold required for a vaccine to be effective at immunizing a population..
However, according to openaccessgovernment.org, Hong Kong approved emergency use of Sinovac after “receiving new, undisclosed data from the drugmaker about their latest experiments,” which suggested its efficacy is “62.3 percent ... when two doses are given with 28 days in between them.”
That would put it on a par with the AstraZeneca vaccine, which showed 62 percent efficacy when two full doses were administered to adult participants of all age groups. The pharmaceutical company’s own published trials indicate that the vaccine’s efficacy rose to 90 percent in a sub-group of a smaller number of participants not older than 55 who were given a half-dose followed by a full dose booster.
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